The ability to receive electronic documents, e.g., email, on a mobile device (e.g., smart phone, tablet, etc.) is greatly advantageous. It allows, for example, important communications to be sent from one or more people to one or more other people without the delay associated with, e.g., email received via a desktop computer, such as waiting for the email recipient to be at their desktop computer to access the email. However, some communications may not be as important as others. For example, an email from one's co-worker may have a higher priority over an email advertisement (e.g., spam) or chain letter.
Due to, for example, the increasing number of emails received daily, prioritizing and sorting through each email is generally slow and cumbersome. For instance, one technique to sort through emails is to fully open each email in a “conversation view” so that the importance of its content may be determined. In the conversation view, multiple actions may be used to navigate through the email (e.g., scroll up/down/left/right, etc.) and multiple actions may be assigned to the fully opened email, such as deleting, archiving, labeling, etc. However, a noted disadvantage of this technique is that fully opening an email typically requires all of the information (e.g., content) in that email to be retrieved from an email server. Due at least to, e.g., the limited bandwidth and/or processing resources of some mobile devices, fully retrieving an email may require a delay to the user while the information is being retrieved. This may become frustrating to the user who typically expects real time access to information.
Another technique to sort through emails is to have a “thread view” or “subject view” where very small amounts of the subject, content, or “snippets” of multiple emails may be seen on the mobile device screen at the same time. However, a noted disadvantage of this technique is that due to the small viewing areas on many mobile devices, the limited content displayed is generally not enough to accurately determine the importance of the email. Another noted disadvantage is that, generally, before the user may assign the action for the email, the user may have to perform multiple inputs (e.g., gestures) to determine on which email the action is to be performed. This requirement may slow down the user. As such, there remains a need for a faster and more efficient way to sort through one's email.